Quotes about People

Children will draw pictures with everything in them...houses and trees and people and animals...and the sun AND the moon.  Grown-up says, "That's a nice picture, Honey, but you put the moon and the sun in the sky at the same time and that isn't right."  But the child is right!  The sun and moon are in the sky at the same time.

The green economy should not just be about reclaiming throw-away stuff. It should be about reclaiming thrown-away communities. It should not just be about recycling things to give them a second life. We should also be gathering up people and giving them a second chance.

"Keep from prying into other people's affairs, for such prying gives occasion for slander, judgment, and other grievous sins. Why do you need to be concerned about others? Know and examine your own self." -- St. Tikhon
of Zadonsk

"Sometimes God allows a relative or fellow worker to cause us problems in order to exercise our patience and humbleness; however, instead of being grateful for the chance God gives us, we react and refused to be cured.  It is like refusing to pay the doctor who is giving us a shot when we are ill."

Father Paisios Eznepides (+1994)

You can't stay in your corner of the forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.

There are as many loves as there are people.

For those of us who care for an earth not encompassed by machines, a world of textures, tastes and sounds other than those that we have engineered, there can be no question of simply abandoning literacy, of turning away from all writing. Our task, rather, is that of taking up the written word, with all of its potency, and patiently, carefully, writing language back into the land. Our craft is that of releasing the budded, earthly intelligence of our words, freeing them to respond to the speech of the things themselves – to the green uttering forth of leaves from the spring branches. It is the practice of spinning stories that have the rhythm and lilt of the local soundscape, tales for the tongue, tales that want to be told, again and again sliding off the digital screen and slipping off the lettered page in inhabit these coastal forests, those desert canyons, those whispering grasslands and valleys and swamps. Finding phrases that lace us in contact with the trembling neck-muscles of a deer holding its antlers high as it swims toward the mainland, or with the ant dragging a scavenged rice-grain through the grasses. Planting words, like seeds, under rocks and fallen logs – letting language take root, once again, in the earthen silence of shadow and bone and leaf.

We see people and things not as they are, but as we are.

To provide its happy people with perpetual fun is now the deepest purpose of Western civilization.

The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.

No one is exempt from nature's mandate to be both a sender and receiver of positive messages.

Surround yourself with people whose lives work in every important way, and you will become one of them.

It is the denial of death that is partially responsible for people
living empty, purposeless lives; for when you live as if you'll live
forever, it becomes too easy to postpone the things you know that you must do.

When the people call Earth 'Mother,' they take with love and with love give back so that all may live.

There's no difference between lyrics and poetry.  Words are words.  The only difference is the people who are in academic positions and call themselves poets and have an academic stance.  They've got something to lose if they say it's all poetry; if there's not music to it, and you have to wear a certain kind of checkered shirt or something like that.  It's all the same.  Lyrics are lyrics, poetry is poetry, lyrics are poetry, and poetry is lyrics.  They are interchangeable to me.

People turn over their lives to spiritual work to try to escape, and want all their problems to go away, be solved; but spiritual life is hard and takes all your effort. Keep your intelligence about you.

Stop complaining. Take charge of your life. You need to control the mind and the senses - sharp, alert, awake. Focus your life on God by getting control of your senses. That loss of control of your senses means that you're not going to God. You control your mind with intelligence. Use your brain for control. Hardly anybody is controlling their mind and their emotions, hardly anybody. And because of this, most people are in chaos in one way or another in their lives.

If your life's story were written, would you read it?

Life is what you make it will your story have a peak, a conflict, suspence, action, a climax, and a conclusion? Or will you live your life keeping it safe and never taking any risks?  Ask yourself: if your life story were written, would you read it?

Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil.  My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.

The world, we are told, was made especially for humans - a presumption not supported by all the facts...  Why should humanity value itself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation?  And what creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is not essential to the completeness of that unit - the cosmos?  The universe would be incomplete without humans; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge.  From the dust of the earth, from the common elementary fund, the Creator has made Homo Sapiens.  From the same material God has made every other creature, however noxious and insignificant to us.  They are earth-born companions and our fellow mortals.

And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people as one of many hoops that made one circle.

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our Founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

It's the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different, that their voice could be that difference.

Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention. 

The popularity of the greatest reflects on the aspirations in all.

The librarian spoke in a reverential whisper. Corliss knew she'd misjudged this passionate woman. Maybe she dressed poorly, but she was probably great in bed, certainly believed in God and goodness, and kept an illicit collection of overdue library books on her shelves.

A language is an exact reflection of the character and growth of its speakers.

My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities.  I am truly a "lone traveler" and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude - feelings which increase with the years.

That's a logical place to find each other because this place works almost as a natural selection for people that have this intention to jump off the margin of the map and we all meet here - where the lines of the map converge.  There is no point that is south of the South Pole. ... Those are the professional dreamers - they dream all the time.  And I think, through them, the great cosmic dreams come into fruition, because the universe dreams through our dreams.  And I think that there's many different ways for the reality to bring itself forward and dreaming is definitely one of these ways.

Most of what I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there in the sandpile at Sunday school. These are the things I learned: Share everything.
Play fair.
Don't hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don't take things that aren't yours.
Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.
Wash your hands before you eat.
Flush.
Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
Live a balanced life - learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
Take a nap every afternoon.
When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.
Be aware of wonder.
Everything you need to know is in there somewhere.  The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation.  Ecology and politics and equality and sane living.  Take any one of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or your government or your world and it holds true and clear and firm.  Think what a better world it would be if we all - the whole world - had cookies and milk about three o'clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap.  Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess.  And it is true, no matter how old you are - when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.